Protect Your Identity

You can reduce your risk of becoming a victim of one of the fastest growing crimes, identity theft.

Identity theft occurs when a thief uses personal information like your bank account or Social Security number to pretend to be you, opening a new account or credit card in your name.

By posing as a real person, the thief runs up bills but never pays, leaving you with credit problems. Identity theft costs businesses billions of dollars each year, and it costs consumers their good names. The growing scourge of medical identity theft adds another, more dangerous element for victims: contamination of their medical records.

More than 167 million people in the US were victims of ID theft last year. (Javelin Strategy and Research, 2018) North Carolina is currently 18th among the states in terms of identity theft. Durham-Chapel Hill, Charlotte, Raleigh, Fayetteville, Rocky Mount, Winston-Salem, Asheville, and Jacksonville rank in the top 150 metropolitan areas for ID theft complaints in 2017. (Cities are ranked by complaints per 100,000 residents. The Charlotte market includes reports from Gastonia, Concord, and neighboring Rock Hill in South Carolina.) (FTC, 2017)

The identities of more than 10.3 million North Carolinians have been put at greater risk of ID theft by the more than 4,500 security breaches reported to us since December 2005.

Cost to Businesses and Consumers

Consumers lose billions of dollars to identity theft each year, and businesses lose tens of billions. It is estimated that individual victims who are working to restore their good names and credit spend about $500, and dozens of hours, trying to undo the damage.

Many victims suffer in other ways, including being denied credit, being harassed by creditors for bills that aren’t really theirs, having their utilities cut off, getting sued, or being arrested for crimes they didn’t commit.